Panic on the Plaza

“You’re shaking, Marc” said Mendoza, the nice kid who makes me tuna sandwiches (for which I pay him, of course), and then I realized, ‘yes, I am.’

Well, I covered by telling him, “too much coffee,” but I suspect he knew: that wasn’t it.

And that’s when it hit me: that’s why I flubbed all those auditions—those many, many auditions which involved hours of glorious playing at home, a wrenching ten minutes of sheer musical hell, a taxi-ride-with-tears-suppressed home.

I am a racehorse, not a plow horse. At any loud noise I startle, panic, bolt. And today, merely by going off to read names with two loved ones—something I have done for months now—I was nervous.

Yes—we’re a third of the way through the 30,000 LivesProject; today we finished Hawaii and began Illinois. And Raf’s mom, Ilia, strolled as always into the plaza, dispensing greetings, muzzling kids heads, assuring all the little girls they were “tan linda, nena.”

“Besos,” she tells me; we kiss.

I have been sitting in Plaza de Armas on a green resin chair, next to which is another green resin chair, on which artfully is draped a shirt and blue jeans. And I have been pondering my body, specifically my brain, which is firing neurons down to my adrenal glands, which is making me want to run, not fight.

Do I know that I am not in danger?

Yes.

Do I know that I am scared, shaking, dreading the moment when I will have to start reading names, approaching people, trying to engage them and—more often than not—getting no response?

No.

Does my body know?

Yes.

That’s the thing—I may rationally have known that I was under no threat, as I waited those hours for my moment to fail the audition to come. My body, however, was screaming a different story. And it’s curious—both the body and the mind play the cello. Yes, those are my fingers on the fingerboard, holding the bow—but those body parts are under the control of the mind.

And for all those years when I was failing auditions, I never really knew that.

Or did I?

Yes, I had been a psychiatric nurse; yes, I knew something about physiology. But at the core, there was something wrong with me, something bad about me, something shameful.

“You have to believe in yourself,” friends would tell me.

“You have to see it, really envision it, make it real,” they would say.

“Did you want to fail?”

Why was I sabotaging myself? What dark corner of my psyche hid the roaring beast that would spring to attack me, those auditions behind the curtain? What was wrong with me?

It was savage—enduring and cleaning up from those auditions. It would take a couple of months, before the pain would start to ebb. I could talk to no one, I who was so flawed that I had caused myself once again to fail.

“It’s OK,” I told him, that guy in his thirties and forties, that guy who lives in me, that wonderful guy. “I’m here, remember? I walked you to El Morro and showed you my door and pounded on it and taught you and protected you. And remember, I read you and laughed at you and thought, ‘shit, how did he do that?’ Remember? And I still do.”

“I know,” he told me. “Thanks for that. Thanks for being here.”

“You’re wonderful,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter about those auditions.”

“Right, so can I get the cello out?”

“We gotta call Rodrigo, the repair guy.”

“Can you do that for me?”

“Yes.”

An old lady is pushing her walker towards me; the wind blowing her chestnut hair, the smile leaping up in her face.

“Besos,” she says.

We kiss.

All three of us.  

Two Musicians, One Message

Well, I’m not immune to it. I have a dark side; I can feel envy, jealousy; the dark night of the soul occasionally visits me. So that may be why I had an absolutely negative reaction to the TED Talk that Ji-Hae Park gave today.

Park is first of all a wonderful violinist—she’s got a stunning technique and plays with terrific energy. She started off the talk by playing Vivaldi, and she nailed it. Then she spoke, and it was all over for me. She had, you see, struggled many years from depression, and then she had realized: the amazing power of music! So then she got cured, and went on to play at Carnegie Hall! Oh, and she was playing the Petrus Guarnerius of 1735, which a German foundation had lent to her.

So her message was play, play your life! Music will change your life, it had lifted her out of depression, now she is playing all the major halls, and prisons and leprosaria as well! And at the age of 28, she has decided to do a crossover album, a merge of rock and Baroque music.

I should be nicer; I should be able to have some empathy. I know something of depression myself, having been intermittently suicidal for many years; I also know something about music, having played the cello, also for many years. So why was I so antagonistic to Ji-Hae Park?

Well, we could start by saying that even in the darkest hours of my depression, music was never able to lift me out of it. Lexapro 20mg or music? Sorry, it was only the Lexapro that did it.

Actually, the cruel trick of depression is that you cannot do the things that you need to do to get better. So when I was really depressed, I couldn’t even listen to music—I was too depressed, it wouldn’t have occurred to me.

The other thing that unnerved me about Park was the difference between her orgiastic energy when playing, as opposed to her little-girl affect when speaking. Is it a cultural thing? Is it my prejudice?

And why did I feel—it was only about her? Curious, I turned to a clip of her playing Beethoven Spring Sonata. Of all compositions, it’s one that is absolutely democratic; the piano is fully the equal of the violin. But even when the piano clearly has the theme, Park never steps back, plays her supplemental stuff quietly and lets the piano shine. She’s always on top.

Last rant—why do classical musicians always get so defensive? Why do we think that by adding a drum and sweetening up the music, we can get other people to love classical music? We’re just giving the message—no, we’re not good enough.

I watched the clip below twice.

Right, then I turned to another musician, and had the opposite reaction; I was moved to tears by the story he told. And notice, please, the music Gupta chooses to play—two pieces by Bach, the most cerebral music for the violin. Right, his technique isn’t anywhere near Park’s. But I suspect his heart is bigger by far.



And I was curious, as well, about the piece Park felt was insufficiently interesting and had to be jazzed up. I knew the piece—La Follia—and I knew that many baroque composers had written variations on the tune. In fact, Wikipedia tells me, over 150 composers have used the theme, among them being such non-Baroque composers as Liszt and Rachmaninoff.

But here’s the un-rocked version.

You choose....